Stephenson, Ethan Taylor (Author)
McEathron, Scott R. (Advisor)
This dissertation tracks the automaton’s appearance in Victorian literature from 1840 to 1900. It shows how authors across genre, form, and time conceptualized and responded to the Machine Age, using the automaton as a symbol of humanity’s changing relationship to machine technologies. Chapters 1 and 5 trace how Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and E.E. Kellett’s “The New Frankenstein” (1900) similarly address concerns about gender equality in Victorian Britain, challenging the assumption that women could themselves be classified, and controlled, as talking/reproducing automata. Chapter 2 argues that Dickens’s conceptualization of the human machine in Our Mutual Friend (1865) allows his working-class characters a degree of class mobility outside of bourgeois object-oriented ontologies. The automaton informs Dickens’s commentary on Victorian class. Chapter 3 reads The Coming Race (1871) as a reactionary response to what Bulwer-Lytton perceived as the machine’s potential to liberate women from the domestic sphere. In this dystopic vision, women would necessarily come to control all aspects of society when freed of housework by the machine. Chapter 4 looks at Scots working-class poet Alexander Anderson’s 1878 collection Songs of the Rail. Anderson lauds the train engine as savoir and prophet of a coming technological age. I argue that he creates a literary aesthetics for that age by anthropomorphizing the steam engine, extending to it his own poetic voice.
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Article
Tresch, John;
(2011)
The Machine Awakens: The Science and Politics of the Fantastic Automaton
(/isis/citation/CBB001231753/)
Article
Mahriana Rofheart;
(April 2020)
Fictional Technologies of Collaboration
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Article
MacDougall, Robert;
(2006)
The Wire Devils: Pulp Thrillers, the Telephone, and Action at a Distance in the Wiring of a Nation
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Book
LaGrandeur, Kevin;
(2013)
Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Artificial Slaves
(/isis/citation/CBB001201685/)
Chapter
Kang, Minsoo;
(2012)
From the Man-Machine to the Automaton-Man: The Enlightenment Origins of the Mechanistic Imagery of Humanity
(/isis/citation/CBB001200744/)
Book
Catherine Keyser;
(2018)
Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions
(/isis/citation/CBB820731169/)
Chapter
Ward, Megan;
(2020)
Victorian Fictions of Computational Creativity
(/isis/citation/CBB006195578/)
Thesis
Nocks, Lisa;
(2005)
To Serve and Obey: A History of the Android, 1850--Present
(/isis/citation/CBB001561611/)
Chapter
Crosthwaite, Paul;
(2011)
Clockwork Automata, Artificial Intelligence and Why the Body of the Author Matters
(/isis/citation/CBB001201379/)
Article
Martina Heßler;
(2020)
Überflüssigwerden, reparieren und ermächtigen: Facetten eines anthropozentrischen Diskurses um die technische Ersetzung der Menschen (Making superfluous, repairing and empowering: Facets of an Anthropocentric Discourse around the Technical Replacement of Humans)
(/isis/citation/CBB528355587/)
Book
Ketabgian, Tamara Siroone;
(2011)
The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001211504/)
Book
Fred Botting;
Catherine Spooner;
(2015)
Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB966967924/)
Chapter
Mosley, James;
(2013)
The Technologies of Print
(/isis/citation/CBB001500579/)
Book
Francis, R. D.;
(2009)
The Technological Imperative in Canada: An Intellectual History
(/isis/citation/CBB001200657/)
Article
Rubery, Matthew;
(2013)
Canned Literature: The Book after Edison
(/isis/citation/CBB001201826/)
Article
Alice Crossley;
(2021)
Odd Age, Old Age, and Doubled Lives: Asynchronicity and Ageing Queerly in Israel Zangwill’s Short Stories
(/isis/citation/CBB545440937/)
Book
Reynolds, Nicole;
(2010)
Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001211500/)
Book
Maria Gioia Tavoni;
(2021)
Storie di libri e tecnologie. Dall’avvento della stampa al digitale
(/isis/citation/CBB578661884/)
Book
Richard Fallon;
(2021)
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard' Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon
(/isis/citation/CBB569188287/)
Article
Madureira, Nuno Luís;
(2010)
Oil in the Age of Steam
(/isis/citation/CBB001421529/)
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